Author: Brayden Lindrea, CoinTelegraph; Translation: Wuzhu, Jinse Finance
The tokens of the encrypted social media platform friend.tech plummeted after the team transferred the management and ownership of their smart contracts to an empty address on Ethereum —— permanently giving up any control over them.
On X, friend.tech stated that the transfer took place on September 8th, with the purpose of 'preventing any changes to its fees or functionality in the future.'
According to CoinGecko, after the transfer, the platform's token FRIEND has dropped nearly 26% in the past 24 hours, to $0.067.
Source: friend.tech
The empty address of Ethereum is a burn address, with the purpose of intentionally destroying tokens. Anything sent to this address will be irretrievably lost. Tokens sent to this address cannot be recovered or reused.
Serpine Text, the creator of the blockchain reputation protocol Ethos, posted on X that friend.tech's move is 'the end of an era' and 'totally different from what I imagined.'
Three months ago, friend.tech announced that it would establish its own blockchain, 'Friendchain', which has caused confusion among the community about the future direction of the protocol, leading to changes in smart contracts.
Friend.tech's X account later deleted its announcement post, which added to the confusion.
The friction between the friend.tech team and its users intensified when many people reported issues with the heavily hyped FRIEND airdrop in early May.
The token accumulated a market cap of $0.2336 billion in the first four days after its launch, but it has now fallen to $6.3 million.
According to DefiLlama data, the total value locked on friend.tech has dropped from a historical high of $52 million in early October 2023 to less than $3.5 million at present.
The fluctuation of the total value locked on friend.tech since August 2023. Source: DeFiLlama
Since late July, the protocol's daily revenue has been consistently below $1,000, and the trading volume of FRIEND has also experienced a similar decline.
Friend.tech is an ethereum layer 2-based native product that allows creators to monetize their content through tokenized ownership or "keys". Its competing platforms include Theta Network, Hive, and Decentralized Social.